A group affiliated with Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the killing of a liberal Bangladeshi blogger this week, the SITE monitoring service said yesterday, citing a statement posted by the group online.
Ansar al-Islam, the Bangladesh division of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), said its members had carried out the attack as “vengeance” because blogger Nazimuddin Samad had abused God, the Prophet Mohammad and Islam in Facebook posts.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify the authenticity of the message but SITE said the group had provided a link to its digital signature to verify it.
The 28-year-old was killed in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka on Wednesday by attackers wielding machetes, the latest in series of murders of secular activists by suspected Islamist militants.
The postgraduate law student was attacked as he was returning from a class at his university, police said.
“This operation was conducted to teach a lesson to the blasphemers of this land whose poisonous tongues are constantly abusing Allah, the religion of Islam and the Messenger,” the AQIS message in Bengali and English read, according to SITE.
Al Qaeda leader Ayman
al-Zawahri announced the formation of AQIS in 2014 in a video posted online in which he said the group would spread Islamic rule and “raise the flag of jihad” across the subcontinent.
Bangladesh vowed yesterday to catch the killers of a student murdered this week after criticising Islamists on social media, as hundreds of secular activists held a protest to demand action.
Nazimuddin Samad, a 26-year-old law student, was killed late on Wednesday near his university in Dhaka by unknown assailants carrying machetes.
It was the latest in a series of murders of secular bloggers and campaigners in Bangladesh and has sparked international outrage, as well as demands for the government to protect freedom of speech in the Muslim-majority country.
Police yesterday filed a murder case and said they were treating his death as a “targeted killing”, although no arrests have yet been made.
Abu Hena Muneem, a senior home ministry official, dismissed claims the government was failing to protect secularists and said the authorities were doing all they could to track down
Samad’s killers.
“The accusations are not correct. Our law enforcement agencies are working very hard to find the culprits and they will soon be arrested,” Muneem said.
Activists, however, expressed concerns about the government’s readiness to protect them as they held a protest march in the
capital Dhaka.
Around 400 people chanted slogans including “stop the culture of impunity, save secular Bangladesh”.
“It is very worrying,” said Imran Sarker, a spokesman for Bangladesh’s biggest secular activists’ group Gonojagoron Mancha.
“We wonder whether the government actually has the goodwill to put an end to this.”
Samad’s murder was the sixth such killing in 15 months.
His childhood friend and fellow activist Gulam Rabbi Chowdhury said he had gone into hiding before the attack and deactivated his Facebook page for a number of months.